N810 Impressions

Technology,

The N810 arrived just in time for the long weekend to Breckenridge, CO and it was nice to have a new toy for the travel time. For me the big reason for getting it was to replace my old Zaurus SL5500 which kept track of appointments, contacts and music. Anyone that read reviews for the N810 will note it’s not marketed as a device for managing contacts and appointments but it is open source and their are a large number of apps available…. so I wasn’t concerned. That was actually part of the reason for getting it, to take advantage of the ongoing development.

My first try at playing music was a dud, which was disapointing on the plane ride out of town. But I will say it’s my own fault. I ripped some CD’s to WAV, assuming it was supported and didn’t verify before I left. Now the reason I chose WAV is OGG wasn’t supported and I didn’t have the codec for MP3. But I found some time at the airport on the trip back to load SoundConverter and the instructions for MP3. I was then able to convert my WAV files to MP3. The default music player is decent but it will be nice to see what else is out there.

Since then I’ve loaded some additional apps like GPE for contacts and calendar and SSH. I also loaded Pidgin all of which can be found from http://www.gronmayer.com/it/, third party repos for the 770, 800 and 810. Up next will be the GPS.

Breckenridge weekend

Personal,

This past weekend we headed to Breckenridge, CO for a little R & R and some boarding for me. We got in late on Thursday evening as my sister and her family were already at the condo… they came in on new years day. Friday morning it was out to the slopes by 8:30, we had scheduled a private boarding lesson with the resorts Ski and Ride Program. It was just the three of us myself, brother in law and my nephew. It was a good day and well worth it, even though I had to take a conference call for about an hour in the morning. That evening we headed to the Breckenridge Brewery for dinner, nice atmosphere and good eats.

Saturday it was just two of us on the slopes as the others had enough already. So armed with new knowledge on boarding I took off to the blues, after a one shot down the greens, to hone my skills. We headed over to Peak7 in hopes it wouldn’t be a busy and get some protection from the wind. It didin’t take long for me to realize my technique needed a bit of work. A few runs and a few spills later I was ready for lunch and maybe calling it a day. So we headed over to the base of Peak8 and I knew when I got there I was done. Problem being we had to get over to Peak9, that’s where the condo was. So one last run up the Mercury lift and over to Peak9 base, I’ve never been so fatigued before … ever !!!.

Sunday morning came soon enough and we all headed back to Denver. Their was a big storm coming and it was reported to start at 12:00am on Sunday but it didn’t start snowing till 6:00am. By the time we left at about 10:00am their was already 4 to 5 inches on the ground and the prediction was 1 to 2 feet. Traffic from Denver on I70 was packed with skiers coming up to take advantage of the new snow. I’m sure if you live out there your use to the conditions I remember back in IL it could get bad but that’s been a few years. We did at least take some picks on the way back, here’s the feed. We visited with some friends and watched the Titans playoff game, then it was off to the airport for a late flight. Back home at 1:00am Monday, made for a short day yesterday.

A good quick trip none the less and the cold I caught on Saturday has left just as quickly as it came on, which is good as I’ve got a bit of hockey this week.

Lov’n gift cards

Technology

It’s been a while since I’ve had a new gadget and with gift cards to spend from christmas seemed like the time was right for something new. Since 2002 my Zaurus SL5500 has served me well but it has been five years, battery life is minimal and internet acces is only practical plugged in. So I ordered the replacement the other day, Nokia’s N810.

When Nokia came out with the N800 at the beginning of the year I was tempted but with no keyboard I couldn’t do it. One of the coolest features of the Zaurus was the slide out keyboard, it had one on screen you could use with the stylist but it was slow and cut the display by a third. When the 810 was announced in November and I saw it with the one feature I’d been waiting for it was only a matter of time…. oh and the GPS didn’t hurt either. It should arrive just after the new year and in time for a long weeked in Breckenridge, CO.

Dual booting easier than I thought

Technology, ,

Yesterday was a long day filled mosting with testing applicaions for work. Not what I had envisioned for a Saturday but time is a premium these days. So what does that have to do with dual booting…. well a few weeks ago two of the three DIMM slots on the desktop I use for work went bad which cut the memory to 256mb. To be more efficient I loaded XP on a spare laptop drive and started using it. Yesterday for some reason I got tired of swaping out the drives, as this is my personal laptop that runs Ubuntu, and decided I should just setup a dual boot system if I’m not going to replace the desktop any time soon. So I did and it was easier than I thought.

A quick google pointed me to an endless number of posts on how to set up a dual boot system. What was a little different for my situation was I wanted to put XP on the drive Ubuntu was already on and I didn’t want to reload XP but copy the partition. Wouldn’t you know on the first page of my search results pointed me to this post which was exactly what I was looking for. The key would be resizing and moving the partitions, the artical suggested using GParted which turned out to be the perfect tool. In the past I have not had much need for using a partition manager so doing this type of process was a little new.

Moving and resizing partitions on the 60GB drive Ubuntu was on was the first order of business so I downloaded and burned the GParted Live CD. I put the CD in the drive and booted, following the instructions, and I was in business. Making space was nothing more than dragging the mouse on a bar graph to set the new size of an existing partion, making room for Windows. So were /home on Ubuntu was 40GB it’s now 20, with the other 20 being for XP. Setting the new partition to be ntfs was just a couple clicks. The article commented about creating one formatted as FAT32, for sharing data, but for me that is all on a usb drive and not necessary. Once that was done copying the (c:\) partition from the Windows drive, connected to the laptop via usb, was a simple as copy and paste, All that took about 5 minutes of clicks and checks and 15 minutes of the application working, and me waiting.

So far with a total of about 20 – 30 minutes worth of work it came down to booting both partitions. The Ubuntu partition loaded as usual, Grub was not changed so their was really no reason that would be a problem. The trick would be to get XP to boot. First would be to fix boot.ini on the XP partition so it knew where the OS was on the new drive, that’s where using the XP CD to “Repair” an installation would fix the problem. This page on Microsofts support site told me everything I needed. Including pointing me to how to fix the boot.ini. All in all my total time was about 45 minutes, needless to say I am pleased.

Kudos to James Bannan and APCMag for posting an excellent article. The pics were a great reference and even though I didn’t follow it to a T it was just what I needed to get the job done.

Roscoe update

Personal

After four trips to the vet, and another scheduled for Thursday, Roscoe’s tail injury is looking pretty good. I had yet to see the progress since he ripped the bandage off just after we got back from thankgiving, but that all changed this morning. I untied his tail so he’d have an easier time taking care of business and not two minutes later the bandage is laying on the ground and a skinny little stick of a tail was wagging like gang busters. Didn’t expect that…. but took advantage of the opportunity and it is healing nicely.

We made it to the vet with no more damage and I picked him up this afternoon. He continues to act as if their are no problems in the world and nothings wrong. Seems like everyone at the vet knows him now… and is everybody’s friend. I hope Thursday’s visit will be the last and we can get back to normal.